Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Supreme ideologies

Patrick, our favorite Paragraph Farmer, got a subscription invitation to The New Republic, with the promise that it would explain why not to vote for Justice Alito. Based solely on what was written in the email about the New Republic's approach to the Supreme Court nomination, Patrick was easily able to turn that invitation down. Fortunately for us, he walks us through his thought process, which reveals such intellectual gems as this:

What interests me more than what Rosen thinks of Alito is what Rosen thinks of Sandra Day "swing vote/centrist" O'Connor, because while she deserves kudos for being pioneering and conscientious, her jurisprudence doesn't seem all that coherent to this layman. O'Connor never seemed to grasp what Scalia and Thomas know in their bones: that case-by-case fairmindedness devolves into whimsy when it's not anchored in principle.
While I'm at it, Mr. Peretz, the other thing that gives me pause is your unabashed cheerleading for "moderate and congenial" liberalism on the Supreme Court. Whatever happened to drinking the law straight, with no ideological chaser?
You like that Justices Breyer and Ginsburg sailed through their respective nominations; I say the Republican decision to grant them smooth sailing was a conspicuous failure of nerve for which we're still paying years later. Believe you me, that indictment should not be understood as an attempt to solicit or excuse present-day lectures on stare decisis, "super precedent," and "settled law" from senators who bend over backwards to protect the federal power grab that is Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
Unlike some of your readers, I don't much care whether a Supreme Court nominee belongs to an alumni organization whose magazine once published a less-than-politically correct satire not actually written by the nominee. That's old-fashioned guilt by association, which is different in kind and degree from the material facts of recent employment, such as Justice Ginsberg's pre-Supreme Court stint as chief counsel for the ACLU, whose famously cramped reading of the Bill of Rights ignores the "free exercise" end of the Establishment Clause while overlooking the Second and Tenth Amendments. [Hyperlinks omitted, so you'll have to go to Patrick's blog if you want to find the interesting stuff that lies under his own fine writing.]

I have to admit that I was for many years a subscriber to The New Republic, a magazine with a long history of slightly left-leaning intellectual honesty. Even before 9/11, though, I somehow lost contact with its chronic anti-Bush points and, by 9/11, I entirely disassociated myself from the magazine.
I will say, though, in Martin Peretz's defense, that he has been a staunch friend of Israel, even when the Lefties (including at his own magazine), began falling like nine pins around him in their defense of the Palestinian's murderous ideologies. Indeed, his defense of Israel was so strong, he turned his back on Kerry and supported Bush in the last election.
Talking to Technorati: Samuel Alito, Supreme Court, The New Republic